Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (17 page)

Meanwhile,
Orange was about to have his annus horribilis in terms of escapes.
It was as if all the charges he levelled at the convicts were about
to be proved. It started on 27th May 1873, when John Batts, a
thirty-two year-old, suicidal thief was out walking with an
attendant and two other patients in the Asylum grounds. During this
gentle stroll, Batts suddenly took off from the path and made for
the woods. The attendant in charge of the group quickly deposited
the other two patients with a working party nearby and then took
off himself in pursuit of Batts. The alarm was raised and a number
of other attendants soon joined the search. Batts was found by one
of them a short while later in the neighbouring parish of
Sandhurst. He put up no resistance, and the attendant enlisted the
help of a passing labourer to escort Batts to the village centre,
where he was retrieved to the Asylum by cart. Batts was sent back
to Millbank, the labourer was given a one pound reward, and there
was the opportunity for all to feel that lessons had obviously been
learnt from 1871, and that systems were now in place that made it
unlikely any patient could escape the estate.

Regrettably,
any hint of self-satisfaction would be found misplaced, and sooner
than they might have imagined. For it was Orange’s misfortune that
the next flight of the year would lead to a third patient vanishing
without trace, and the only such loss under Orange’s direct
command. The fact that the subject was also the only murderer in
Broadmoor’s history to never be recaptured only doubled Orange’s
embarrassment.

It was
Saturday 12th July 1873, and patient William Bisgrove was
exercising in the Asylum grounds, accompanied by Attendant Allan
Mason. It was not the first time that Bisgrove had been allowed
outside the walls: he had been exercising in this fashion for about
18 months before. On this particular outing, Bisgrove and Mason
strolled around the southern fields of the estate before turning,
and making their way back towards the Asylum farm, pausing only to
talk about the chickens that were running around their enclosure.
As they moved on, Bisgrove pointed out some rabbit burrows adjacent
to the footpath, and Mason, a big man, bent down to look at one of
the burrows. Now that he was off guard, Bisgrove hit him hard on
the back of the head with a stone in a sling, in the traditional
patient manner. While the attendant reeled from the blow, Bisgrove
attempted to throttle him, and then the two men grappled each
other, before Bisgrove threw off his custodian and made his way,
like previous runners, into the pine woods of Bracknell Forest.

Mason was
temporarily incapacitated, but recovered and quickly made his way
back to the farm. He raised the alarm, and then set off again in
the direction Bisgrove had run. A thorough combing was made of the
woods, but with no success. There were no leads until, as the
searches were going on, word was received that someone fitting
Bisgrove’s description – a man with thick black curly hair and
beard, and wearing the plain blue Asylum jacket and waistcoat with
fustian trousers – had been spotted in the grounds of Sandhurst
Military College. A search party spent the night there. Bisgrove
was not found.

On the Sunday
morning, a message reached the Asylum that Bisgrove had been seen
in Aldershot on Saturday night. So throughout Sunday, a team of
constables and attendants visited every lodging house and
outbuilding in Aldershot, only to report back empty-handed once
again. Then on Monday, a local woman told the Police that she had
seen a man jump into the Basingstoke Canal two miles from
Aldershot. The Canal was dredged, yet nothing was brought up that
was connected to the fugitive. The Police back in Somerset were
alerted, and the search closer to home was widened to Basingstoke,
Winchester, Southampton and Portsmouth. Twelve days later, Orange
called off the chase. In the back of his mind was the fourteen day
rule of the Lunacy Act 1845, that once a certified lunatic was away
for a fortnight, all the paperwork that committed him to an asylum
became redundant. Though this was a minor issue, the deadline
served to concentrate the mind. By the time the period had elapsed,
it was probably sensible to stop wasting unnecessary effort:
Bisgrove could be anywhere.

The fourteen
day window was usually, of course, enough to cause escaped patients
to turn up. When Bisgrove did not, then as with other runners
before there was little choice but to wait until something
happened. So Orange waited, as nothing happened, and the murderer
on the run was quietly forgotten. Bisgrove’s description remained
in circulation for a long time. Years later, in 1891, the
Metropolitan Police asked Broadmoor whether they thought Bisgrove
could be a man called James Sadler, who they had arrested for the
murder of a Whitechapel prostitute – and who has occasionally been
mentioned in connection with the Ripper murders – but the
authorities were not convinced. It is an inconclusive end to the
story, and Bisgrove’s disappearance remains without a satisfactory
coda.

Orange, a
diligent and dedicated man, must have worried at the time that his
errant charge was capable of committing an act that would lead to
their eventual reunion. At the age of nineteen, Bisgrove, an
epileptic coal miner from Wells, had spent a long August evening
drinking with another youth and his girlfriend. Staggering towards
home, they had reached a cornfield where they stopped. Bisgrove
offered the girl two shillings if she would have sex with him, and
she was inclined to accept. They laid down a short distance from an
older man, George Cornish, who was asleep under the stars. As the
other boy sat on a stile beside the byway, Bisgrove took the girl,
then got up, walked across the field and picked up a large and
heavy stone. He carried it over to Cornish, the sleeping stranger,
and dropped the stone on his head. Cornish was mortally wounded,
and died where he lay.

Bisgrove and
his male friend were arrested and sentenced to death at the
Somerset Assizes in December 1868. Both would have hanged, but
Bisgrove confessed that he alone had committed the crime, though he
had no recollection of it. His companion was set free and
Bisgrove’s own sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment.
The west country adolescent had then been admitted as a convict to
Broadmoor in early 1869, where he became one of those patients who
broke the windows and made threats to the staff. During the last
couple of years he had become calmer, hence his strolls around the
grounds, though as Orange noted, Bisgrove was ‘always a morose and
sullen man...inclined to recklessness partly from natural
disposition and partly from there being so little apparently to be
either hoped for or feared by him in this world’. Bisgrove’s
character was such that it seems incredible that he might have kept
himself out of trouble for any great length of time after his
escape, so perhaps this occasionally suicidal young man did end up
at the bottom of the Basingstoke Canal in 1873 after all.

Less than a
month after this unscheduled decrease in the lunatic population,
and while Orange was away on a long weekend, the Asylum lost
another patient. This would prove to be another long-term loss, and
at the time, his departure was considered to be as permanent as
Bisgrove’s. On this occasion it was the turn of John Walker, a
thirty-five year old stonemason from Birmingham, to breach the
staff’s defences. Walker was known to be a difficult patient. When
he was ten years old, he had taken his older brother’s breakfast to
the factory where he worked, seen a mouse, chased it, and been
struck on the head by the fly wheel of some industrial machine. He
had suffered from learning disabilities ever since, and had been
convicted of burglary in 1866 and given ten years inside. While in
prison, he had begun to sense that he was controlled by witchcraft,
hence his removal to Broadmoor in 1867.

The
circumstances of the case were similar to that of Bisgrove, in that
Walker was being supervised outside the walls. On 7th August 1873,
he was in a working party of eight patients in an oat field to the
north west of the Asylum. The morning had passed without incident,
and after lunch, the group returned to their labours. By 4pm, the
party had been at work for several hours, and they stopped for a
break. The patients lined up, and the two attendants in charge
poured out beakers of oatmeal and water for the men to drink.
Walker was one of the first to receive his refreshment. By the time
the attendants had reached the end of the line, they looked up to
see Walker making his way towards the edge of the field. This was
not unusual: they were some distance from the Asylum facilities,
and if a man wished to spend a penny, the field edge was as good a
place as any to do so.

As they
watched, Walker reached the edge of the field, where he halted.
Expecting to see him undo his trousers, their casual observation
turned to alarm as Walker proceeded to vault the fence and, like so
many before him, make off into the woods. One of the attendants
immediately began to run after Walker, but caught his foot in a
ploughed rut in the field and fell over. This gave the patient
enough time to make good his sylvan flight.

It was a case
of déjà vu. The usual searches were conducted of the woods and
surrounding estates, the local police and the Met were informed,
the railway stations were watched. He could be found nowhere.
Walker was considered to be a low risk patient – Orange suggested,
perhaps sheepishly, that ‘his liberation at no distant period would
probably have taken place’ – but this was a further failing all the
same. To lose one lunatic might be considered a misfortune, but to
lose two most definitely had the whiff of carelessness about
it.

Fortuitously,
this missing patient did turn up again, a little over five years
later, and two years after his prison sentence had expired. It was
a chance meeting between two old acquaintances. On 28th September
1878, one of the Broadmoor attendants was visiting Birmingham when
he spotted Walker about the city. A personable conversation ensued,
and the attendant suggested that it might be better for Walker to
accompany him, in order to remove officially the cloud still
hanging over his freedom. Even more fortuitously perhaps, Walker
agreed, put up no resistance to returning to Crowthorne, and
travelled back with the attendant the next day. Perhaps he felt
that he had nothing to fear, as he had made a success of his time
outside. After his escape, and as the summer of 1873 continued, he
had taken seasonal work as a harvester, crossing England on a path
from Berkshire to Liverpool. When winter arrived on Merseyside, he
had gone back to his old job as a stonemason, moving back to his
native Birmingham in 1874. At the time of his voluntary
apprehension, he was earning two pounds per week and getting on
well. It was quite apparent that Walker was sane and was also a
productive member of society. It was in no-one’s interest to stop
his contribution. Orange discharged Walker absolutely three weeks
later, gave him five shillings for his trouble and also paid his
train fare back to Birmingham.

Orange could
afford to be relaxed about escapees by the autumn of 1878. In 1873,
the year still had another sting for him in its tail. The final
escape of 1873 took place on 12th November. It had its roots back
in August too, when there had been a theft from the Principal
Attendant’s room in Block 1, one of the ‘back Blocks’ with higher
security. Nearly fifteen pounds had been stolen – a large sum of
money – and although searches had been made throughout the Asylum,
the money had not been recovered. The reason was that a conspiracy
was in progress. Despite a one pound reward on offer for
information, the money was being hidden, quite possibly in turn, by
two patients: Timothy Grundy (who may be remembered from Escape
from Broadmoor: Part One) and John Brown. Using the money they had
thieved, both men also managed to bribe a corrupt attendant,
William Phillips, into providing them with a skeleton key.

Brown was
known as ‘a very powerful man’. Stout, twenty-six years old, and
serving a fifteen year sentence for wounding, he had attacked both
staff and patients at Broadmoor since his admission in April 1871.
He was another convict who had outgrown the cells at Millbank, and
he did not find the regime at Broadmoor to his liking: ‘I am weary
of life in this cursed Bastille of misery and destruction’, he
wrote. He was often secluded in the Block, and for the two months
before his escape he had embarked on a daily destruction of both
fixtures and fittings on his ward. His behaviour improved in the
few days before he escaped, almost certainly because now he had his
key and wished to make use of it, and as a consequence he had been
allowed around the Block again.

Shortly before
6pm on the day in question, he made out of the scullery on his ward
in Block 1, opened the door to the Block with his key and went
outside. He unlocked the airing court door, walked onto the
Terrace, through another door and then into the yard where the wood
was stored. He took two sets of steps, and placed a trestle over
them. Then he climbed up, and over the wall, and made his way to
Bagshot, where he spent the night in a cattle shed.

The staff were
lucky. The next day, Brown used his money to make for an obvious
destination that was being watched. He bought a ticket from Bagshot
to Waterloo Station, and was retaken as he stepped onto the
concourse in London. Giving a detailed, if varied account of his
actions, it soon became apparent that Phillips was indirectly
responsible for Brown’s escape and the attendant was dismissed
immediately. A little over five pounds of the stolen money was
recovered from the inside of Brown’s backside, and the patient was
moved onto Millbank again the following year.